Thursday, February 12, 2015

Nomisma.org News

After much work, the new Nomisma.org
framework has been launched into production. Not only is this a major
architecture migration (moving the public UI from Apache Cocoon into Orbeon), but a data migration. We have implemented a new data model for IDs that conforms to the Nomisma ontology
that Karsten Tolle has been working on for at least two years. IDs have
a more stable system of classes that will improve the predictability of
queries. There are presently 16 classes by which IDs are defined--most
of them in the nmo: (http://nomisma.org/ontology#)
namespace, but we are using the W3C Organziation ontology for
expressing roles of people and organizations (under foaf:). The ontology
is still evolving, but has a carefully curated set of properties and
classes that pertain to numismatics. Certain URIs (like nm:mint), will
never again be used simultaneously as classes and properties. In fact,
all of the URIs that were used as classes and properties have been made
instances of nmo:NumismaticTerm. Instances of mints (like Rome or
Athens) are an nmo:Mint, and nmo:hasMint is the property to use for
linking a coin or coin type to a mint URI. The ontology and data conform
to standards established by the semantic web and computer science
communities.

Data dumps from museum collections (like the ANS and Berlin) have been
migrated into the Nomisma ontology, as have RDF exports from online type
corpora, like OCRE and CRRO. This involved updating Numishare's code to export in the new ontology (see http://nomisma.org/documentation/contribute
for example), as well as update SPARQL queries and the XSLT for reading
latitude and longitude in the new model for mints. Mints are now
reckoned as concepts (carrying the skos:Concept class, as well as
nmo:Mint) that may or may not have a spatial feature, linked with
geo:location. The object links by the geo:location is a geo:SpatialThing
which may either have a latitude and longitude or have geoJSON
encapsulated in the osgeo:asGeoJson property. Complex shapes,
represented as geoJSON, can be drawn in Nomisma's XForms-based editing
interface (powered by Orbeon). geoJSON objects created in OpenLayers in
the editing interface are extracted by Javascript and incorporated into
the XForms engine.

The new features of this framework are almost two numerous to mention, but here is a synopsis:

IDs are available in their native RDF/XML, but also serialized into
Turtle and JSON-LD. IDs for regions that may contain complex geoJSON
polygons are exported in geoJSON-LD. These serializations are linked from the ID page. Data dumps of all IDs are available in these three serializations as well.

Spatial queries are supported by extending Fuseki to interact with a Solr index.

Much improved browse interface allows for additional filtering by
roles of people/organizations and sorting. These filters can be applied
to the Atom feed as well.

Content negotiation is supported for IDs, the SPARQL endpoint, and the browse page. See http://nomisma.org/apis#access for more information about interacting with IDs and Solr. The SPARQL endpoint supports text/html,
text/csv, text/plain, application/sparql-results+json, and application/sparql-results+xml.

RIC and RRC ids have been deprecated by Nomisma, as OCRE and CRRO
maintain up-to-date and better quality versions. HTTP 303 See Other
redirects are established for any ID that contains a
dcterms:isReplacedBy property that links to something else. See http://nomisma.org/id/rrc-44.5.

We have begun documenting the model and example SPARQL queries. The documentation will evolve to become more comprehensive in the coming months.

The system in general is far more stable and efficient now that
RDF/XML has replaced XHTML documents. It reduces the need for additional
transformation when delivering web services. More than 90% of HTTP
requests for Nomisma content comes from machines (about 30,000 per day).

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.